I feel tempted to start on a high note extolling the necessity of web video for any online business, and indeed offline business as well.
Let me instead bring out some interesting stats that tell a compelling story. The following video elaborates them further.
The numbers I mention here are old by a few months as of this writing. But I am sure they have only bettered as you read this article, whether a month or a year down the line.
What is of more significance is the trend of steep increase in both the viewership and number of online videos. You will agree that there lies a big opportunity to take take advantage of web videos.
The figures leap at you..
comScore reported that in January 2009 YouTube surpassed 100 million viewers for the first time. Before that TechCrunch in a Dec 2008 article said that YouTube represented 25.4% of US Google site searches in November 2008 compared with 17.4% in November 2007.
Jan 2009 also saw 76.8% of total US Internet audience watching online video (was that because many people were indoors due to massive lay-offs!). The average viewer used 356 minutes for video viewing in the month.
The story is the same in other countries, notably the Europe. For example in France the online video audience grew by 16% over the past year to reach 27 million viewers in Jan 2009.
3 reasons
It will be fascinating to study and analyze the reasons of the rising popularity of web video, something that started after Google acquired YouTube in October 2006.
Given the fact that more and more people look for information on the net, a good part of which is through search engines, I feel 3 factors are important for consideration regarding online video:
- A huge quantity of web video is being uploaded to YouTube and other video sharing sites. Remember one has to actually upload a web video to YouTube unlike the web pages being automatically crawled and indexed by the search engines.
- Many of the videos in YouTube are really good, both in quality and content. This is in tandem with YouTube itself improving the showing of video. It’s not surprising that viewers prefer YouTube increasingly.
- Learning is easy watching video than reading plain text or even seeing images. We knew a picture is worth a thousand words. Now we know a video is worth a thousand images.
Now, the opportunity..
I often say to my colleagues that the Internet actually stands for ‘instant get’. If you look closely you’ll see that the most successful online businesses actually provide nearly instantaneous service barring a few.
The advantage in such cases is that there always are some gaps to be filled. No illustration is better than the fact that today’s web video is largely a videocam movie, and in some cases other type such as PowerPoint slideshow.
Yet it is easily possible to make 5 types of web videos and combine them into a single one.
Why the need, you may ask. The point is you punch more value to your video when you have different ways for reaching your message.
At 2WebVideo, we have the video tutorial course that teaches you to create and combine 5 types of web videos. What’s more, the all-video tutorial lessons thoroughly explain some of the best video software available, more than half of which are free!
There is no better time to start making web video than now. Video marketing is likely to shortly emerge as the most important tool to convince and clinch your customers.
 This article of May 24th, 2009 is authored by Partha Bhattacharya, who runs this website. Catering to the clients' video needs aside, Partha also writes guest articles for other web publications. |
